[In this video, six people are having a conversation. The people’s names are Chelsea Jordan-Makely, Charissa Brammer, Amy Bahlenhorst, Sara Wicen, Carol Peeples, and Renee Barnes.]

Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Can everybody talk some about how did you take care of yourself through this project? And I maybe want to add on to this and your teams because I know your leadership style Charissa and I’m feeling that from you too, Carol. So, I’d love to hear what ya’ll have to say.

Carol Peeples: Charissa, go!

Charissa Brammer: I think it was a lot of like, so a thing that we did not plan for this project, but that ended up being really good is that there’s a long drive from Denver to a facility. Most of the time, like you are in the car for a couple 3 hours before and a couple 3 hours afterwards, and I think that those times ended up being very helpful for me emotionally because it gave us all as a group time to decompress and to just say that things that needed to come out and all of those things. And I do feel like it…It ended up being like a lot of like, just disjointed thought-making, at least on my part. But I think that those spaces were really, really helpful for us because it was people that had been in there that understood it. This is a profoundly emotional process, and so dealing with that is important. I think we also like there was a rule that you didn’t even if the focus group got done early, that was the end of the day, right? Like that you’re done working for the day because it is so taxing emotionally and just energy wise because you’re trying to manage all of these things all at the same time. Talking to these folks. So yeah, I think. I don’t know how helpful any of that was to the team, but for me personally that was a really important sort of like side benefit of prisons being out in the middle of nowhere generally is that we had that time to decompress and to really think about it. I also was in regular therapy during the entire process, which is important both for life reasons and for this.

Carol Peeples: You know, we did a lot of unpacking too. We didn’t have a long drive necessarily, but I know the whole team, but we had pairs and we got to unpack it and we also would, you know, just a lot of conversations with the staff. I love that we got to get together as a team too a couple times. I really look forward to that. I gotta say we haven’t mentioned it, but this was fun. This this project was fun and also one thing we haven’t mentioned is the pandemic, right? So, this didn’t like this came right on the heels of things opening back up, if I’m recalling, everything is such a blur.

Charissa Brammer: Yep. Right.

Carol Peeples: But if I’m recalling correctly, like this is just on the when we were starting to get back together. And so we had that too.

Charissa Brammer: Mmhmm.

Carol Peeples: It was a part of that was just being able to be colleagues, and that was a benefit and that helped.

Charissa Brammer: Yeah.

Carol Peeples: It helped me. Felt good.

Amy Bahlenhorst: I will say that one thing that was really helpful to me beyond the ability to unpack in the car was I think our team had an understanding that if any of us needed to walk away at any point during any focus group, any point during the day, you just walk away. You just excuse yourself and the rest of your team has your back, so I think it’s a lot of trust building with your team that was super important, but then you also come home and a lot of us live with people and for example, I live with my husband, and I had to have a conversation with him. That was “Hey, at the end of these days, I don’t have anything left to give, and I’m gonna be quiet. And I would really appreciate if you can like respect that and be there for that.” So having the people in your life kind of understand what’s going on, I was really, really helpful to me.

Sara Wicen: Yeah, I would completely agree with that. Like sometimes I wanted to talk about things afterwards, but I also learned very quickly that I just needed to give myself the space to know that, like, not gonna be up for much the rest of the day. Like, don’t schedule anything with like a large group of people, because most of the time I just wanted to go like, take a hike and process a bit that way. Or, yeah, just allow myself to not be perfectly OK, the rest of the day.

Renee Barnes: I would say umm, our team has a little bit different perspective about going into prison. We’re sort of used to it in a way that everyone else was not, right? So, but something that was really beneficial for our team and all the members of our team was to get to bond with the other members of the state library team and really build some good relationship, working relationships out of I out of that. Which is beneficial for so many reasons.

Carol Peeples: It is such a shock to go into a prison from an outside perspective when you see what we do as a society with, you know, cages and control, it’s really hard and a human being to see this.

Charissa Brammer: Mm-hmm.

Carol Peeples: I know human beings adjust and they readjust as they come out, but it’s a difficult….construct.

Charissa Brammer: Yeah. We would a couple of times that I can remember very specifically. We would go in, do our day and come back out and just walking out into the sun was like a full sensory experience of just like I didn’t realize that I didn’t have this all day and it was like taking your first breath of the day. And so, I think, yeah, there’s the libraries vary based on that, but yeah.

Chelsea Jordan-Makely
Thank you all…thank you for your candor in, in sharing your responses as well and…I really loved a lot of those perspectives.